Stephen Kampa: “The seed for this poem was a strange phenomenon I once read about known as a cardiac concussion, which I somehow misremembered as involving a substantial lag between a sharp blow to the chest and the victim’s subsequent heart failure. My misremembered version led me into a meditation about the way our heartbreak (and indeed all of our experience) follows us into whatever lives we try to lead thereafter, and these ideas dovetailed nicely with another piece of trivia: that the Witness Protection Program has never lost a participant—according to them—but with that one major caveat of participants having followed all the rules. From there, the poem accreted its layers of strange fact and memory and misinformation. I think that if the poem comes to a conclusion (and it may not be a poem’s job to do so), it has to do with what really follows us throughout our lives: not heartbreak, but our way of responding to it—in a word, our character.” (website)